Hulu Blocking Democrats’ Ads Is No More ‘Censorship’ Than Social Media Removing Harassment
from the it's-just-not,-stop-it dept
What a terrible world it would be if Republicans and Democrats alike start pushing for 1st Amendment-violating demands on websites that they be compelled to carry speech they don’t want to. Over the last few years, we’ve seen mainly Republicans pushing for these kinds of “must carry” / “can’t moderate” rules in response to what they (without any actual evidence) believe is anti-conservative bias in moderation. The end result were some blatantly unconstitutional laws that have been mostly… ruled unconstitutional.
For a while, it looked like Democrats were focused on the other end of the unconstitutional 1st Amendment spectrum, proposing ridiculous bills that would require websites to remove content deemed “misinformation.”
Of course, the reality is that both parties are pretty hypocritical on this. And both seem to live by the rule that most people use to govern their thoughts on content moderation: “websites should keep up the content I like, but websites must take down the content I dislike — and anything else is obviously a problem.”
Republicans, of course, have done this flip flop plenty. While pretending to want to require social media to host content, they’ve also pushed bills requiring certain content be removed at the same time.
And now, Democrats seem to be suffering from the same kind of hypocrisy. Despite spending the past few years demanding websites become more aggressive in taking down content, as soon as its content the Democrats like, they’re sounding like their counterparts from across the aisle whining about “censorship.”
On July 15th, a group of Democratic campaign organizations attempted to purchase a joint ad on abortion and gun control on the Disney-backed Hulu platform along with other digital buys on Facebook, YouTube, and Roku and more traditional placements on broadcast and cable channels. The ad ran on every other platform, but Hulu rejected it. Hulu hasn’t told the groups if it will run the ad, a Democratic party official told The Verge.
In a joint statement on Hulu’s rejection on Monday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Governors Association said, “Hulu’s censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country.”
Oh, come on. It’s not censorship. It’s just Hulu deciding that it didn’t want certain political hot button issues on its platform right now. Censorship is the state telling websites what content they must take down — something many members of the three committees who put out this statement have done quite a lot of over the past few years.
You can argue for why the decision was a mistake, but to call it “censorship” is just wrong, and plays into the nonsense being spread by Republicans that private companies must be required to host whatever nonsense they want to post.
That’s not how it works. Hulu doesn’t want your ads. Go post them somewhere else and move on.
Filed Under: censorship, content mdoeration, democratic congressional campaign committee, democratic governors association, democratic senatorial campaign committee, democrats, grandstanding, political ads
Companies: hulu
Comments on “Hulu Blocking Democrats’ Ads Is No More ‘Censorship’ Than Social Media Removing Harassment”
As Popehat put it:
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Well said.
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I personally don’t have Hulu because it’s owned by Dibsney and NBCUniversal (I could access it via VPN if I wanted), but as you and Popehat both point out, refusing the ‘service’ a platform on my computer is me exercising my free speech, not censorship.
media has always censored ads
Just because a publication sells ad space does not mean they are required to take anyone’s money. This is nothing new and isn’t going to change. Anyway who sees ads anymore, isn’t that why god invented ad blockers?
Censorship is something a government does. Businesses just make business decisions.
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If you subscribe to Hulu’s lower-priced tier that has ads, you can’t block them if you’re watching on, say, a Roku device. I know this for a fact because I was watching Only Murders in the Building (a Hulu exclusive) with my mom last night and there were tons of ads so we had to bite the bullet and watch them.
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It’s also an arms race. The ad supported video streaming services try to detect ad blocking, and the ad blocking services try to mask the fact that ads aren’t being shown.
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How do you square that with your subject line, “media has always censored ads”?
Really, the idea that only governments sensor is a fringe view of the term. The MPAA rating system, and studio meddling to game it, have always been called censorship (though not “illegal censorship”) by filmmakers; the same goes for the actions of the “standards and practices” departments of TV channels, even non-broadcast channels exempt from FCC censorship. Then there’s the idea of “self-censorship”, obviously nothing to do with governments.
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Good thing your fucking fringe view isn’t held by the majority of actually smart people and organizations.
ie, CAPITALISM AT WORK. At least in America.
Fuck you. Self-censorship is very much a real thing influenced by the laws and social norms of the country, and I live in a country where the entire fucking goal of the political party in power is to get people to self-censor themselves, AND IT WORKED.
Please go surrender yourself to the nearest FBI agent, you clearly are a NeoNazi and a threat to American society.
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Censorship isn’t carried out only by governments, actually. Now please go surrender yourself to the nearest firing squad. You are clearly a Republican shill and a danger to civilized societies everywhere.
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That’s technically foreign interference through “religious” organizations.
And I’m from Singapore, arguing using 1A as the definition. At least 43% of our bureaucracy and some key ministers are full on shills for white supremacism.
You can claim I’m a Republican shill. I’ll just say I hate them enough that if given a choice, I’d ensure that they can never run ever again.
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So you’re saying that people can’t act unless instructed by a government to do so? And you claim to not be a shill of any government organization? How do you square two such conflicting assertions?
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*any political organization…
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I thought you guys were supposed to be mostly staffed by pro-CCP toadies? Now you’re shills for white supremacism? Which is it?
Re: We must help the billionaires be more free. - The left
Omg, can anyone imagine living in a world where the people are afforded the same speech rights as the billionaires running social media?
ZOMG THIS IS HORRIFYING!!
Not censorship
This isn’t censorship, but censorship doesn’t require state action. We have a long history of private censorship in the U.S. Private censorship doesn’t implicate the First Amendment like government censorship does, but saying it is no longer ‘censorship’ if a private entity does it is incorrect.
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I don’t think it’s particularly productive to get bogged down in the semantic debate about what is or isn’t censorship, but I do think there’s something to the idea that private entities can impose censorship regimes. The Hays Code and the Comics Code Authority may have been “voluntary” and not carried the force of law, but they inarguably had a huge suppressive effect on the types of content that appeared in their respective media.
Regardless, I don’t think that’s relevant to the discussion at hand. Whatever censorship is, this ain’t it.
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I feel the same way about Nintendo of America’s censorship regime for games that would appear on their system in the late 80’s and 1990’s until the ESRB was formed, and they never removed any objectionable content from third party games for their systems again as far as I can tell (except games rated AO)…
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Nintendo’s content policies certainly had a profound effect on the games that appeared on Nintendo consoles, but on the other hand there was competition in the video game market that makes that example pretty different from the film industry during the Hays era, or the comics industry in the years after the Code was instituted but before the rise of specialty comic book stores.
Any game company that didn’t want to deal with Nintendo anymore could license games for a competing console, or release them on PC and avoid the licensing issue altogether. Indeed, third parties abandoned Nintendo in droves in the N64 era and Nintendo’s had a problem with third-party support ever since (though of course that’s been at least partially due to Nintendo’s hardware choices, not just its content policies).
I’d say that ultimately the biggest difference is that in the Hays Code example the movie studios were all collaborating on the content standards and the theaters were enforcing them, and in the Comic Code example the comics publishers were all collaborating on the content standards and the newsstands and drugstores were enforcing them, but in the Nintendo example it was just Nintendo, going it alone, and competing platforms with different content standards were available to those who wanted them, whether that was customers, sellers, or publishers.
Which I guess isn’t too far off the Hulu example, really; Hulu doesn’t have anything like the dominant market position Nintendo had in the ’80s and early ’90s, but nonetheless, if you don’t like Hulu you can take your business elsewhere, whether you’re watching shows, distributing them, or selling ads for them.
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Nintendo abandoned their censorship policies in the Super Nintendo generation when the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat outsold the Super NES version because it had blood and gory fatalities in it and the Super Nintendo version did not. In the sequel, Nintendo allowed the blood and the fatalities to splatter, so to speak (all it had was a “mature audiences” warning label on it) and they abandoned their censorship policies. The reason this wasn’t an issue during the NES era was because Nintendo had 90% of the market and used anti-competitive tactics to maintain it. Once they had competition in the form of the Sega Genesis (and the Sega CD add-on), games such as Night Trap, Lethal Enforcers, and Mortal Kombat spurred on congressional investigations and the ESRB was the response.
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Nintendo abandoned their censorship policies in the Super Nintendo generation when the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat outsold the Super NES version because it had blood and gory fatalities in it and the Super Nintendo version did not.
IIRC, the SNES version of Mortal Kombat did actually have blood, but it was green rather than red.
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That was explained away as Sweat rather than blood.
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“Gray puffs of sweat” that were green rather than gray.
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Seems like an arbitrary line to draw. Nintendo, after all, didn’t actually stop anyone from speaking. People could’ve released games on another platform (Sega, PC), used another medium altogether, or hacked around Nintendo’s system like Color Dreams et al.
Nintendo’s regime just meant artists couldn’t go where the people were, so to speak. That’s still the case with the ESRB and similar rating systems. Sure, technically anyone can (in the USA) release things unrated or as X or NC-17 or AO, if they don’t care about popularity. In reality, film and game studios compromise the original artistic visions all the time, to get favorable ratings. Certain types of art just never get made, for lack of marketability.
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Nintendo, in the NES life cycle, had 90% market share and engaged in anti-competitive tactics such as not selling to stores that would sell other consoles such as the Sega Master System. Selling to Sega wasn’t an option. PC games were sold in stores, as the internet was as slow as Trumpy’s brain back then. When Apogee started with Shareware, it all started to change, but that was in 1989 and the beginning of the end of Nintendo’s censorship regime, when people were starting to have more options.
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If we’re reading from the same book…
Not selling to stores was one of two tactics they used. The other was “undersupplying” to stores that sold a rival product.
Control of the supply like is a dangerous thing.
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Re: Not Censorship
You’re definitely onto something, and the key is that I haven’t heard of any rule that hulu had in place which would disallow these kinds of ads. Just let the Democrats run their message. Perhaps this isn’t a case of government censorship, but it’s definitely corporate censorship, and it suffers from the same lack of justification.
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Well, at least you’re a consistently principled asswipe.
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It’s called the market.
I am unsurprised you hate the market for actually saying “fuck political ads”.
Here in Singapore, we get political bullshit shoved into our faces and we’re forced to take it because the press is owned by the government, ie, the political party in power.
And it fucking sucks.
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Semantics aside, a significant difference is that there is no requirement that corporate ‘censorship’ have a justification, but there is such a requirement on government censorship.
Similarly, government stepping in and requiring a corporation carry any particular content has a similar constitutionality requirement to demanding it not carry content (ie censorship).
But then, you know this already. Or if you don’t you’ve been willfully blind.
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Ah, so if they censor only black voices, that’s okay with you.
Just cite section 230 and you can silence anyone you want with impunity!
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[Hallucinates facts not in law or reality]
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Instead of a lazy response, maybe respond with why the writer is wrong.
If tomorrow Twitter rewrote their algorithm to exclude blacks from posting on their service, would you be okay with that?
What if they claim it’s just a by-product and not the purpose of their secret algorithm, but they won’t show you their algorithm because it’s considered a trade secret?
They either are a private company and have complete control over who posts on their ‘property’ or they don’t.
Who are you to decide for them what they consider ‘otherwise objectionable’ as listed under section 230’s allowable private censorship?
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[Hallucinates facts not in law or reality]
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Shh honey, the adults are talking.
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Actually, if I cite §230, it means I can’t be silenced by anyone you want with impunity. 😛
No-one has a monopoly on thinking they're right
“Hulu’s censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country.”
Great, now flip the parties because you can be sure that the republicans think the same thing for all that content they want to force platforms to host. See the problem yet?
If ‘you’re not allowed to take down or refuse content that the poster thinks is true’ were the rule nothing could be taken down or refused to be hosted since even assuming someone was presenting content that they knew was wrong all they’d have to do is claim otherwise.
Well, this article's kinda moot now...
Hulu’s done a backflip.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/hulu-democrats-campaign-ads-abortion-guns-1388213/
Re: Ugh.
I hate how Hulu was bullied into doing it from people with power. I agree with the issues, but now Hulu is going to be the ball in even bigger Political football (whichever code of Football you want, be it Association, Rugby, American, Canadian, Australian Rules, etc.)
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Hulu Is a Common Carrier wrt Streaming Entertainment Content to a Subscriber
Hulu is not a common carrier wrt to inserting an advertisement into entertainment content.
Hulu should be compared with a taxi cab. The taxi cab company is a common carrier for passengers but not for putting an advertisement on the exterior of a cab.
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You should have stopped your comment earlier. Hulu is not a common carrier.
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TBH, I wanted to say”Twitter is not a common carrier,” but I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that truth.
Re: Re: Re: When a legal nitwit has no argument, he resorts to spoofing
It seems mature but is understandable among those with no understanding of the US legal system.
Re: Re: Please Learn Something about the Supremacy Clause and the Doctrine of Preemption
The Supremacy Clause and the Doctrine of Preemption should be clear to the average fourth grader.
From a legal standpoint message common carriage by a telegraph does not differ from message common carriage by a social medium platform. Until the Mann Elkins Act (1910), legal controversies over message common carriage of digital personal literary property were all litigated in state courts.
Please start reading the decisions by the Courts of Appeals of the United States including decisions of SCOTUS.
Primrose v. Western Union Telegraph, 154 U.S. 1, (1894)
When the FCC declines to regulate a message common carrier like a telegraph service or a social medium platform, authority to regulate returns to a state.
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Unless Congress steps in and says otherwise.
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Nonsense. An entity silencing opinions based on viewpoint is committing censorship. The 1st Amendment doesn’t allow governments to do that but does allow private entities to do it, but that does not make the actions of the private entities any less censorship.
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An entity silencing opinions based on viewpoint is committing censorship.
And where do you see anyone claiming otherwise? Your problem seems to be that you can’t tell the difference between an organisation saying, “We won’t carry that message for you,” and another saying, “We won’t allow your message to be carried by anyone.”
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“ Zero censorship, actually, troll. Hulu refusing to carry the ads doesn’t prevent them being seen on other services.”
The problem is some people refuse to recognise censorship in a localised fashion, which in turn pushes them to be against censorship completely. Which itself (zero censorship) would actually violate free speech.
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“Localized censorship” refers to censorship carried out in a region, preventing anyone in that region from seeing the message, not a single service refusing to carry a message that other services are willing to carry. But one can hardly expect vocabulary knowledge from a shit-for-brains troll like you that reckons adverts you refuse to block are spam.
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Yep, exactly what I said. In this case Hulu not allowing the content in their distribution.lbtegion. Those who access their service.
The difference between you and I is you want to hide your head in the sand. The republicans are correct. As are the few dems such as here.
It’s a matter of self righteousness. Having to be correct. When it’s ‘your own’ beliefs, you scream censorship. But when something you don’t like is offed you say nothing.
I on the other hand recognise where a bar on private censorship becomes a disaster if not a tyrant.
Twitter should not be forced to carry anti-vax messaging. Or pro vax.
Hulu should not be forced to host political content they don’t agree with.
And a satanic bookshop should not be forced to carry the bible.
As soon as you can force to host, forced delisting follows.
The right to self censorship, editorial discretion, must be preserved. The ability to choose between using it or not, should be at the private level.
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VPN eliminates Hulu’s attempts as censorship, otherwise you might have had half a point. As it is, you have… nothing.
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Do you know what a VPN is? Seriously, they do not magically conjure stuff from nothing.
If Hulu refuses an advert for their service a VPN isn’t going to change that.
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The difference between you and I is you want to hide your head in the sand.
Every accusation a confession.
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Censorship is the act of the censor, choosing to silence messages based on viewpoint. Because the large generic speech platforms censor opinions you don’t like, you would like to pretend that they are not censoring, using excuses like the ability to speak elsewhere. But censorship is exactly what they are doing.
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People like Trump and Nunes using the courts to silence people are practicing censorship. Social media and publishers saying not on our platform are not practicing censorship. To conflate the two is to claim that your can get anyone you want to publish your speech, which is something authoritarians do, while censoring speech that they do not like.
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No, I cannot get anyone to publish my speech, because some of those people have the legal right to censor me. But when they do that, that’s what they’re doing – censoring. You happen to like the censorship that the large platforms are providing for you, so you would like to not call it censorship so that you can feel virtuous about it. But you are wrong.
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[Hallucinates facts not in evidence]
Private!
Private company. Private choices. Private localised censorship. Perfectly legal. Perfectly acceptable.
Move along.
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Private localised censorship.
Zero censorship, actually, troll. Hulu refusing to carry the ads doesn’t prevent them being seen on other services.
No, it doesn’t. Which is why it’s valid and legal.
It’s private, non-government.
And localised
It only affects Hulu.
Freedom of speech includes a right to censor. As long as that is not done by the government.
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Censorship involves the supression of information, resulting in no one being able to access it, whereas the ads discussed in the article can be accessed by users of Roku, for example. Now fuck off and don’t comment again until you’ve corrected your reversed production-comprehension lag, shit-for-brains troll.
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Can a Hulu user access it via Hulu? If not, it’s chosen to be censored by Hulu. That is their right. To chose what not to say.
Using you premise nothing is censored because it can always be accessed elsewhere. Censorship boards that remove parts of a film in, say, UK, aren’t censoring because the same film without the cuts is available in the US?
There’s no censorship in China because blocked sites continue to be available in other countries?
Do you understand how stupid you sound?
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This play is a good example of non-governmental censorship, a streaming service not running particular ads isn’t. Also, regionalization also isn’t censorship as long as DVDs can be purchased online and DVD players will play them regardless of their region number. Do you even realize how stupid you are? Let me tell you, it’s a lot more stupid than you think I sound.
regionalization?
Thousands of film covers stating “uncensored” disagree with you.
In fact companies like CleanFlix/CleanFlicks specifically are based on the states use of censorship. What would you say to censorship bodies that declare themselves censors?
How about music clean, vs uncensored?
Censorship can be localised. Being available elsewhere does not make lack of access or moderation locally any less an act of censoring.
When I write christ with a small c I’m censoring the general display. In doing so i exercise my freedom of speech.
When I toss religious fuckturds and fake diet pill posters into the sandbox I am censoring them from the general board population.
Private censorship, the choice of what not to say, is a vital aspect of free expression.
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VPN, Amazon/eBay, DVD/Bluray players that no longer respect region coding. I ask again: what censorship?